ARC Review | The Surrogate by Louise Jensen

A brilliant epilogue is the perfect ending to another enjoyable read from Louise Jensen. 4/5 stars.

The Surrogate is out tomorrow, Wednesday 27th September 2017

Thank you to Bookouture and NetGalley for giving me an e-copy of this book to read and review.

The blurb: Kat and her husband Nick have tried everything to become parents, and are on the point of giving up. Then a chance encounter with Kat’s childhood friend Lisa gives Kat and Nick one last chance to achieve their dream.

But Kat and Lisa’s history hides dark secrets.

And there is more to Lisa than meets the eye.

As dangerous cracks start to appear in Kat’s perfect picture of happily-ever-after, she realises that she must face her fear of the past to save her family…

My take:

This will be a short review to avoid spoilers!

Regular readers of my reviews will know I have an up-and-down relationships with book branded “psychological thrillers” or “dark thrillers”. However, having enjoyed Louise Jensen’s previous two books – The Sister and The Gift (click the titles for my reviews) – I went into The Surrogate with high hopes, which thankfully weren’t disappointed.

From the blurb and the first couple of chapters, I came to expect something along the lines of The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, but I was pleased to discover that the author gives us something else entirely!

As you’ll expect if you’ve read Jensen’s previous books, the various threads of the story are handled expertly to keep us in the dark and continue delivering surprise after surprise. The characters’ back stories are scattered between the present day chapters, but this is never confusing and does very little to slow the current action down.

I didn’t find the central heroine – Kat – quite as sympathetic as the main female characters in The Sister and The Gift, but she was still well drawn and believable. That said, it was nice to get an occasional break from being inside her increasingly paranoid head space as we dipped into Nick’s point of view.

I must confess, as we got to the end I felt slightly disappointed that things were wrapped up a little to neatly. BUT THEN… the Epilogue happened. This final chapter is a proper punch in the guts. I won’t give anything away, but it contains two fantastic shocks and a revelation about a streak of genuinely disturbing darkness in one of the characters which had only been hinted at previously. It was brilliant, and I wouldn’t have minded more of that darkness earlier on in the story (and I say that as a bit of “thriller wimp”!).

Overall: Yet another page-turner from Louise Jensen. Fans of The Sister and The Gift will be delighted. I predict another huge success!